From: mark@unicorn.com
Date: Fri Dec 18 1998 - 06:23:22 MST
Joe E. Dees [jdees0@students.uwf.edu] wrote:
>The only people/corporations who would have problems with my
>regulations would be bigots, polluters and price gougers. Just which
>category are you defending specifically?
All of them.
Bigots should be just as able to operate a corporation as anyone else,
but they're not going to prosper in any society where the majority of
people aren't bigots. And if the majority are, well, that's dumbocracy
for you.
Many corporations have to pollute in order to operate; some of us just
recognize that the cost of the pollution is offset by the value of what
they produce. In a free market, polluters would have to incorporate the
cost of anti-pollution legal actions into their prices and the cost/benefit
tradeoff would be even clearer.
Price gougers? There was an interesting discussion about this on Usenet
a while ago, where people pointed out that a smart thing for some
corporation with plenty of money to do would be to fill up warehouses
with today's cheap food and sell it in 2000 for many times the current
price. But that would be "price-gouging", and hence illegal in many
places (e.g. the guy who was charged for shipping and selling generators
in recent ice storms) so it won't happen and if Y2K is bad people will
starve because of those laws. Ah, the wonders of government regulation.
BTW, one more message where you quote the entire message only to add a
line or two at the end and you're going in my kill file.
Mark
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